This invention relates generally to floor tile products and more specifically to an apparatus for cutting cover sheets and aligning them with adhesive coated floor tiles in order to protect the adhesive during storage and shipment.
Nothing has encouraged the do-it-yourselfer to lay floors more than the availability of tiles with preapplied adhesive. It means that the homeowner need only peel a piece of paper from the adhesive coated back of a floor tile, lay it in place, and press it down onto the underlying surface. However, those of us performing that simple task rarely consider the complicated effort involved in delivering the tiles to us. Not only must the tile be produced in its normal fashion, but the adhesive must be applied to it, and then the adhesive must be covered by the paper sheet to prevent it from sticking to other tiles in the packing box or simply becoming too dirty to maintain its own adhesive properties.
The process of laminating the backing sheet, the "release sheet", to the tiles has usually involved the use of paper which is cut into tile size sheets and then aligned with the tiles. The adhesive can be preapplied to either the tiles or the paper. It is actually desirable to use some sort of plastic film as the release sheet because such materials are stronger and less expensive, but plastic film has been difficult to use in existing high speed laminating equipment because of the dimensional instability of the film, particularly its tendency to stretch when being cut.
Virtually all the machines with high speed cutting of release sheets use a blade oriented parallel to the axis of a rotating roller with the blade on the surface of the roller and engaging the paper as the paper is pinched between the blade and an anvil on another rotating roller. Such an arrangement operates satisfactorily for paper, but will not work with stronger plastic film. The film will either simply not be cut, or, if it does cut, it will also stretch. Under either circumstance subsequent registration with the tiles is unsatisfactory.
There is a clear need for an apparatus which will cut plastic film without changing its dimension, so that the film can be placed into registry with floor tiles and laminated to them.